And the nine year anniversary of my arrival at the library has come (and gone) – happy anniversary to me!

A great way to celebrate this anniversary: the addition of a fantastic new program to the library calendar. Book Buddies began last Wednesday, and is my most favorite library program ever. Teen volunteers in grades 7 and up are paired with a younger buddy in grades 1 to 4 for shared reading and word games. Last week, the inaugural week, everyone was having such a good time that I had to gently remind them that the one hour session had ended…five minutes ago. The looks of complete surprise at a whole hour having passed already were testament to the fun that both big and little buddies had reading and playing together.

My greatest thanks to Jennifer for finding this awesome program. In September, I said to her that we needed something new, could she see what she could find…and she came back with documentation and guidelines from other libraries that had already run successful Book Buddies programs. Jennifer pointed out that this is exactly the kind of program that we need to be running, and she was so very right.

And one other new thing that we have added: a library Tumblr page. I really like Tumblr for the library’s purposes – it’s much cleaner than Facebook, and you have more control over how your posts look (including fonts and such). I won’t be replacing my personal blog page with Tumblr, but it has the right combo of hipness and accessibility for the purposes of the children’s room. Here’s the link, if you’d like to take a look.

Jim and I are enjoying some much needed R & R, including plenty of cuddle time with the three varmints. (Below are my two new favorite photos of dear sweet wild little Moxie.) We don’t have much excitement planned for this vacation, but hopefully in a day or two I will be renenergized and reinspired to post something of substance here, especially since Jennifer and I have come up with some cool new programs for the fall at the library. Until then, enjoy the Moxie photos!

As summer winds down and fall approaches, I am reminded that my anniversary date of starting at the library is in November. As of early November, I will have been at the library for nine years – wow.

When he learned of my library job nine years ago, one of Jim’s friends made a prediction: “She’ll be at that job for the rest of her career.” I think Jim’s friend is right – it’s a great place to work, with great coworkers, great patrons, and an awesome building, and I’ve finally gotten all the systems (storytimes, collection, etc.) to the level of excellence that I’ve desired. Time to enjoy all that excellence, while I work on new cool things to bring to my job. I won’t rest on my laurels, that’s not my style, but I certainly plan on enjoying those laurels while I add programming and increase the excellence of the collection. Happy almost nine years to me, and here’s to many, many more!

Ten days to go in this year’s summer reading program! It’s been a whirlwind – never a slow moment – and Jim and I are planning a fair amount of down time in our upcoming vacation (a stay-cation).

And the program I most looked forward to this summer is coming tomorrow: Wolf Talk! Yay! If I get any good photos of the wolf, I will post them here.

One last thought: I really, really wish that the spammers and hackers would leave my silly little blog alone. I’m really getting tired of people trying to hack into my blog, and I do wonder why in the world they bother with me and my domain. How hard is it to get your own website, spammers? Please leave this lowly little librarian alone.

This has been the CRAZIEST summer reading program I have ever seen at the library – constantly busy, every day, with almost no down time – and considering that this is my ninth summer at the library, that’s saying something. Mind you, a crazy busy summer at the library is a very good problem to have!

So this is just a very quick update on my summer, all aspects (with, of course, some cat photos!):

Great programs so far this summer at the library, including the annual Ice Cream Social, a concert with the Toe Jam Puppet Band, stories with Mark Binder, hula hooping with Pinto Bella Hoops, a Historical Sword Demonstration with Jeff Goodhind and Jeff Lord, four book group meetings, and storytimes. And lots and lots and lots of kids doing huge amounts of reading (and collecting prizes and working towards their summer reading bookplates).

Home improvement projects are continuing as we can find time to do them. We priced out buying new kitchen cabinets from Home Depot, and realized that it would be cheaper for Jim to build our new cabinets – so that is Jim’s current project. The quote from the electrician for the necessary work in the kitchen should be coming in soon, hopefully low enough that we can afford it, and then we need to figure out our timeline and finally finish off that kitchen.

Needless to say, this summer’s vacation week will be a staycation yet again, both because we need to fund the home improvement projects, and also because we need some time to do them! And Jim is picking up quite a few gigs this summer, including one during our summer vacation. (Acton Boxborough Farmer’s Market, Sunday, August 24.)

And the cats are doing very well. No longer kittens, they are still not adults, and exhibit some rather annoying behaviors still (such as chewing power cords), but they are wonderful little buggers and we love them very much. Moses is absolutely huge now, probably well over fifteen pounds, and the girls, Millie and Moxie, are adorably normal-sized. (See photos below.) We still feed Mommy Cat every day, and I’m trying to see if I can make friends with her, though her continued skittishness makes me think that she truly is feral.

There’s a large stack of books next to my favorite chair, waiting to be read. Most are for upcoming book groups, but I’m also starting to accumulate some “fun reading” books in anticipation of the June break from book groups (and then the August and September break from book groups, which allows me a lot of time to read other things!).

Here are the books that are piled next to me:

The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud (5th grade book group)

Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell (6th grade book group)

The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan (Teen book group)

The Great American Dust Bowl by Don Brown (Teen book group)

Years of Dust by Albert Marrin (Teen book group)

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

The Outcasts by John Flanagan

Marmee & Louisa by Eve LaPlante

My Heart is Boundless edited by Eve LaPlante

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

Curtain by Agatha Christie

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

And assorted magazines, long neglected by me: The Atlantic, many New Yorkers, and Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country.

Any other must-read suggestions for me for my upcoming season of fun reading?

Four weeks ago today, we had to put our beloved, but elderly and infirm, Pippa to sleep. My life has been a bit crazy lately, and so I feel like I haven’t really mourned her yet.

But this morning I got up after having slept a bit late, and thought to myself how lovely it would be on this day off to make a pot of tea and snuggle on the sofa with Pippa and our favorite “magic blanket.” And it hit me like a ton of bricks that Pippa isn’t here anymore.

She was a wonderful girl: smart, affectionate, kind, tolerant, dignified, and an incredible (if reluctant) role model to Moses, Millie, and Moxie. I miss you, Pippa.

I have recently upgraded to a new theme for this blog, and there are two changes to be noted:

I consciously changed the comment settings so that readers can only comment on posts that have been published in the last fourteen days.

And, I have noticed that this new theme has a habit of splitting words at odd points to justify text. For instance, in one past post, the word August was split this way: Au gust, with no hyphen after the Au. When I have more free time on my hands, I will try to figure out how to fix this (if it can be fixed), but for now please know that it is the software and not I who is splitting words oddly.

I hope you enjoy this new theme as much as I do, though! I especially like the random rotation of header photos when you click on one of the pages. The photos are: Moses as a wee little sprite of 6 weeks; crocus in our yard; and the odd duck that we saw a summer or two ago when kayaking on the Concord River.

I dreamt that a library patron called the children’s room and asked me to pull a large selection of DVDS – chosen according to some odd guidelines dictated to me over the phone – and then, once I’d pulled everything for her, that I deliver them to her house.

So I pulled a large stack of what were now CDs (who knows why it switched from DVDS), and proceeded to open each CD case and take all the CDs out. As each disk came out of its case, it turned into an ordinary green pea. Logically, I put all of the peas into a bowl, then went to eat dinner with my family. I might even have eaten a couple of the peas/CDs…that part is a little fuzzy.

A few minutes into eating dinner, my mother turned to me and said, “Don’t you need to deliver those CDs to that lady?” Panic set in, and I rushed over to the bowl of peas and realized that before I could deliver anything, I needed to get the peas back into the CD cases. But the peas were just green garden peas, and weren’t labelled like the CDs had been, so how was I to know which pea went into which case?

I contemplated eating the peas to figure out what they each were, but realized that would be counterproductive, so then I thought about gently tasting each one to determine what music was on each. And I considered just jamming random peas into CD cases and delivering them that way.

When I woke up from this very very long dream, I still hadn’t figured out a solution. Somewhere in my dream world, there are still green peas that need to be converted back into CDs and put into their cases and delivered to an imaginary library patron…

I wish I knew. Things here in blog-land have been a little under assault lately, and hopefully are now fixed. Many thanks to D. of my hosting service, and to my brother for his sage advice; I’ve done everything that I know how to do, and with luck, there will be no more troubles.

Yes, this post is a little vague, but that is intentional. I’m actually running my own sort of test to see if blog-land is happy again.